Paparazzi status
A few weeks ago I released Paparazzi which is an utility for capturing full-length screenshots of websites. I was inspired by Paul Hammonds excellent commandline utility webkit2png which is written in PyObjc.
Paparazzi seems to have grown more popular than I ever expected; over 3500 downloads in two weeks, I didn’t even expect it to crawl above 100 downloads. And I love the emails I’m getting, it makes me motivated to iron out those last few bugs before I would say it is out of beta.
In short I need to fix the following things before I’ll even begin thinking about new features:- Figure out a way to capture the exact width of pages using elaborate framesets. Or make the custom width/height fields more logical (they aren’t even exact is it is now)
- Add some more button-states to the “Capture!” button, like “Cancel” when it’s loading a page and perhaps “Recapture” if the user wishes to capture the same url again
The most requested feature I’ve gotten is some sort of batch function which I’ll start working on as soon as I get around to fixing the above issues. I want to keep Paparazzi simple, but if I’m adding a batch function I’ll either need a new window (that doesn’t open by default of course), or add a drawer to the existing window. I’m still not sure which route I’ll go yet… I also want to add Applescript support, while Applescript may not be overly used I think it’ll be greatly appreciated by those who do, and once Mac OSX Tiger ships, I think more people will get into Applescript thanks to Automator
11 Responses to “Paparazzi status”
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September 27th, 2004 at 12:24 PM
Was wondering if there is a Windows piece of software similar to what you have built. It would just be very expensive for me to buy a Mac just to have this software.
Thanks
September 27th, 2004 at 05:11 PM
Darryl,
Take a look here, here and here and you might find something similar, I haven’t tried them myself however but they seem to pop up elsewhere when people ask for something similar to Paparazzi on windows…
September 27th, 2004 at 06:41 PM
can you set the key commands to the current screengrab key commands such as command + shift + 3 or command +option+shift+3 ??
October 1st, 2004 at 04:15 PM
marie, I’m not sure if there’s a way to “override” those keyboard commands, and to be honest I don’t really think it would be that good an idea, those keycombos should be reserved to grabbing screenshots of the entire screen IMHO…
October 13th, 2004 at 08:07 AM
Hi Johan!
Your app is great, thank you very much! =)
Add my name to the batch function lobby and I would also make another suggestion: add the option to capture the visible browser area (the 1st screen of a page) and not only the whole page like the current capture.
Thanks again =)
Ricardo
October 13th, 2004 at 06:44 PM
Thanks for this very useful utility.
Would very much appreciate being able to cut off the bottom of web pages, to save only the first screenfull of the page. Otherwise you end up with PNG files that are long like toilet paper. Not very convenient.
October 13th, 2004 at 07:02 PM
The idea behind Paparazzi is that it captures the whole page.
But I guess I could fix up the height/width detection, and make the height/width fields really crop the page…
October 16th, 2004 at 10:40 PM
It’s a great software. But, can you add a feature ?
Add please suport for export jpeg files insted of only png files.
I like png but since jpeg it’s best for email :D
November 9th, 2004 at 09:47 PM
Great little piece of code Johan!
One feature that my designer wishes for since I’ve shown him Paparazzi is to be able to load the flash documents in the capture…
Eh. If I go to my company’s website, I don’t see the flash in the capture…
I guess it’s because you’re using WebKit and telling it not to load plug-ins (is that possible) ?
Anyway, if you add that feature, you could have it as a pref to load plug-ins or not.
Thanks again!
November 12th, 2004 at 12:22 PM
I’ve been fairly busy with other things and the Debugger in Xcode won’t play nice with the Paparazzi project for some reason which I’ve yet to find.
But I’m currently investigating ways of capturing flash sites, aswell as some sort of cookie handling (so you could capture a page that requires login).
I hope to be able to work on Paparazzi Real Soon again.
With over 5000 downloads, I can easily see that its an utility many people have found to be usefull so I really want to make it even better as a way of thanking you all for downloading it!
January 19th, 2005 at 06:24 AM
Awesome – so happy I found your app via a link on del.icio.us – this is a daily task for me made a lot easier.
As for my 2 cents about further ideas:
– either a ‘favourites’ menu or URL autofill (for commonly snapped sites and those as lazy as me)
– built-in cropping option would be handy?
– jpeg save would be nice but not essential
I know it is beta but I’d like to see the ‘close window’ red dot too :)